bisulfitebased
Bisulfite-based refers to methods or processes that use chemical bisulfite reagents, typically sodium bisulfite, to effect targeted chemical changes in biomolecules, most commonly DNA. In this context, the essential idea is to exploit the differential reactivity of cytosine bases under acidic, bisulfite treatment: unmethylated cytosines are deaminated to uracil, which is read as thymine during PCR and sequencing, while 5-methylcytosine remains unaltered. This differential conversion creates sequence-level signals that report cytosine methylation status at single-base resolution after subsequent amplification and sequencing.
Bisulfite-based DNA methylation analysis includes whole-genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS), reduced representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS), targeted bisulfite
Beyond epigenetics, bisulfite chemistry is used in food preservation and winemaking historically for sulfiting agents, though